The Deadliest U.S. Natural Hazard: Extreme Cold

There’s a new essay from Indur Goklany in response to a recent Reuters news article.

Yesterday Reuters reported on a study which claimed that heat is the deadliest form of natural hazard for the United States. However, this result is based on questionable data. The study used results for mortality from extreme heat and cold that can be traced to the National Climatic Data Center. But these data are substantially different from mortality data from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) based on the Compressed Mortality File for the United States. The latter uses death certificate records, which provide the cause of each recorded death (based on medical opinion). It is reasonable to believe that regarding the cause of death, particularly for extreme cold and heat, medical opinion as captured in death certificate records is more reliable than determinations made by the meteorologists in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s NCDC (even if they have Ph.Ds.).

The essay draws on data from the CDC database of mortality in the USA. See this table:

Combining data from the CDC database for extreme cold and extreme heat, and various arms of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for floods, lightning, hurricanes, and tornadoes, Goklany has shown that extreme cold, rather than heat, is the deadliest form of extreme weather event. In fact, from 1979-2002, extreme cold was responsible for 53 percent of deaths due to all these categories of extreme weather, while extreme heat contributes slightly more than half that (28%). For more, see The Deadliest U.S. Natural Hazard: Extreme Cold.

Of course we all know that the human race has historically done better during warm periods. While we’ve seen a sloght warming in the last century, we’ve also seen a worldwide improvement in the human condition.

I’m glad that the earlier misinformation has been rectified that cold is truly a greater killer, but its still only a very small fraction of the people that die each year. I guess its just plain dangerous to be alive!

Thank you for the research done to counter that absurd Reuters story. I’ve read of how death rates from heat have declined during the previous century. This is due partly to a better educated populace, better acclimation to the heat, and of course with the improved living standard, air conditioning in places like the southern US where heat can become quite oppressive. If you’ve no A/C, just take off some clothes and slow down. In a cold winter climate, if the cold doesn’t get to you the snow shoveling just might.

Take a simple quiz. Would you rather be a homeless person living in Chicago during a winter cold snap, or living in Atlanta during a summer heat wave (no shelters available for either scenario)?

Put the hurricane deaths with the cold. When there is a greater difference between the equator and the poles, there are more hurricanes. Less temperature difference, less hurricanes. Floods ?? who knows?

But a hurricane is so much more spectacular to watch on television than it would be to have a two-hour long report of watching a thermometer’s indicated temperature drop in real time.

Hurricane reports attract eyeballs which sell advertising and that is the bottom line of the “news” business. It is really the advertising business. They don’t lose money if they broadcast inaccurate hysteria, but they stand to make a lot of money if they can create hysteria that draws people’s attention. And if they were wrong, they can state that fact at 3am on a Tuesday morning and never bring the subject up again.

It’s all about the eyeballs. It is in the interests of the news outlets to enter into some informal, unspoken collusion to create “issues” which attract attention. It works to the benefit of politicians, too, who can then have an opportunity to be seen “doing something” about it. Whether it is real or not is beside the point. Create a crisis, drum up the concern, repeat the most dire predictions you can find, and have politicans jump in to “save” everyone. Everybody on the gravy train wins.

And— what is the cost for XC ? snow plowing, sand,salt, power lines down from ice, frozen pipes, frozen goods food/ paint/ HBA , cars/ trucks crashed , the deaths reported are from cold but what about car related death from snow/ice induced car crash deaths? house fires from heating systems/ more death from fire/suffocation?
Cold is a very bad thing in fact the old news paper articles were much more scary sounding when they announced an ice age!
breath in then out…. repeat!

Slightly off post, the UK’s Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn has picked up today on the story about the New York Times report from 1938. Even refers to a website by a ex TV meteorologist (is that you Anthony?) who takes “global warming” with a large pinch of Sea Salt !!

That’s the first time I’ve seen such a trenchant piece by someone in our MSM. Mind you I love reading his columns cos he likes to debunk the stupidity of our ruling classes, the police and local officials who act like the Gestapo.

I’ve posted a comment and if it gets through the moderators net, have identified this site so more people in the UK may get to read some common sense on the debate. Also anyone seen the Green-Agenda.com site? The author is an environmental analyst who is trying to blow the whistle on what is happening in his “industry”. Our friend Al Gore again……no surprise there.
REPLY: Yup, that’s me, and here is the article: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/12/today-in-climate-history-dec-12th-1938-getting-warmer/ – Anthony

Just a small caveat here – a death certificate will give what the doctor believes to be the immediate cause of death. It’s possible that a heart attack, for instance, might be brought on by heat stress or dehydration and would just give “heart failure” as cause of death. You have to be very careful evaluating data that were collected for other purposes (as the good doctor Mann should be aware).

The relationship between global temperature and flu is quite good. (hot years = low flu). See the dramatic drop in flu for 1998/99 and the rebound for 1999/2000 and 2000/2001. Note the plateau for years 2001/2002 to the present. This year is seeing flu ramp up very early due to our cold start to winter. I suppose if I was Al Gore I could prove that low flu levels cause global warming ;-) Certainly the relationship is much closer than CO2!

Deja vu, I have a sneaky feeling that our Chinese cousins would agree wholeheartedly about that. When I had the honour of being in HK in late Jan 08 all the news stations were covering the worst winter in 50 years, which mushroomed into the worst winter in 100 years, I think I had already mentioned this & the fact that little coverage was made in the UK save for the usual BBC tokenism. (I say chaps, don’t mention the cold too much & perhaps people won’t notice, eh?)

Tens of thousands were stranded in airports, railway stations, & bus stations, for days on end with little warmth, food, or water, all wanting to get home for the Chinese NY. The army was on full alert round the clock trying to clear enough snow in blizzard conditions to assist, a bit like digging a hole in saturated sand, but couldn’t cope with the ever increasing amounts of snow & ice building up, buildings collapsed under the weight of snow, many hundreds (no official toll has been made available to my knowledge but I am willing to hear otherwise) died from the cold in remote areas, simply because the army & aid workers couldn’t get there because of, well the snow actually! None of this really got to the UK because I asked & whilst many new of the bad weather they were not aware of the scale of it simply due to it being dismissed in a few lines of news, yet when the tragic earthquake hit a few weeks later, it was all over the BBC et al big time for weeks. So if cold can devastate in China, it can devastate any where.

It will be interesting to see if fashions change over the coming years, with less soft flimsey cotton garments with which we all have become so fond being warn in the west/northern hemisphere, in favour of that old fashioned stuff called wool, which is infinitely warmer in my eyes when cold (sorry that should have read “less warm”) snaps occur!

It would be interesting to see if anyone does a study to look at the last 40 years & the next, as society has become more “affluent” in the broadest sense, homes have become warmer with more heating facilities, less clothing is then warn as people swan around in tee shirts insted of jumpers with 20-22°C ambient temps in their homes, & the relationship with the Sun & its coming & going cycles. Is there a pattern in peoples behaviour down here with what goes on up there precevied or real?

The ice storm that slammed Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada for the past two weeks, causing at least $1 billion Canadian in damages and resulting in 24 deaths, is being called the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history.

What the stories tells us (both versions) is that weather events are insignificant when it comes to death causes in a modern society. Begs the question on policy priorities: should we try to mitigate a possible but no very likely prospect of more extreme weather events due to AGW, or should the priority be to continue to raise living standards in the third world, so that they also can enjoy the same indifference to extreme weather as we enjoy. If you think that all men are created equal, the answer is given.

“I’m glad that the earlier misinformation has been rectified that cold is truly a greater killer, but its still only a very small fraction of the people that die each year. I guess its just plain dangerous to be alive!”

This is the case in a stable society with sufficient food production, distribution and high housing standards and heating.

The moment people become exposed to the weather (wind, cold and a bad food situation it’s a different story. That is why Stalin put his Goelach’s in Siberia.
That is why Napoleon’s and Von Paulus Armies were destroyed by the Russians.
Harsh winters are a natural defense against invaders.

Our modern society is extremely vulnerable for extreme winter conditions.
And if the world should experience a new Maunder Minimum event without preparation, the major problem will be how to maintain our food supplies.

As I’ve asked many AGW believers before: “Are your crops more likely to die/fail from a 0.5-2.0°C increase (natural or AGW) in temperature or a blanket of snow and ice?”Not Surprisingly, all they can manage is “But… but… but…” in answer to the question.

When I first heard this reported locally on the news (via radio), my impression was that the deaths from heat included everything supposedly caused by increased heat including hurricanes, thunderstorms and the like.
Having moved from New England to the “deadliest” part of the US, I will say that I would rather take my chances here while being warm most of the year rather than spending half the year in the cold waiting for the summer.

Add lost productivity (I’m sitting home instead of teaching students), increased manufacturing costs, huge increases in Dept of Transportation costs, electrical company repair costs, increased overhead costs compared to income with every business that stays open, lost income in nearly every sector from gas stations to food stores. The poor condition of our infrastructure adds to the cost of cold by its fragile nature under cold conditions. The cost of cold overwhelms anything else.

Notice the meeting of moisture-heavy warm tropical fronts colliding with extremely cold (and therefore dryer) arctic fronts that have dropped into and are stalling over much of the Northern Hemisphere. Just like in Hurricane season. Colder temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere set us up for more extreme events when they collide with the relatively stable warmer temperatures coming from the Equator and Southern Hemisphere. It seems that the following is a theory with some strength: Cold temperatures lead to stronger events than warm temperatures do in the Northern Hemisphere.

Once again, a statement from an AGW acolyte turns out to be false. Their perfect record in this regard is beginning to seem like some kind of very extreme event itself, and perhaps needs to be studied.

As kids, we used to say, “Follow them, see what they eat.” Well, from the TAR itself, concerning Australia and New Zealand:

“12.8.1…. However, it must be said that potential gains [benefits of Global Warming] have not been well documented, in part because of lack of stakeholder concern in such cases and consequent lack of special funding.”

The TAR had its own search engine, which turned up no results concerning the “benefits of GW ” in its html version. I found the above TAR note via Google.

Stated in the null hypothesis mode: Greater temperature differences between the margin of cold and warm fronts in the Northern Hemisphere over North America does not result in increased extreme weather events. Any meteorological student out there looking for a dissertation?

Nope. NOBODY can explain it. There are LOTS of things about climate, ice caps, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions weather, etc. that are NOT currently understood by science. That’s why taking accurate data is SO important. Hypothethes that are testable are good. Drawing premature conclusions and stating absolutes is unwarranted.

I agree – warmer means good times, major cooling means bad times, end of civilizations and revolutions among other things and so forth – but – is inluenza the THE killer or is it “just a contributing factor”?

If the envirocrits have their way and electricity becomes a luxury for people without trust funds, lots of people will die facing heat waves without air conditioning. The death toll in France a few years was so high because air conditioning was not available to many old people there.

Actually, Steven and Phil the Arctic stall can be studied and fairly reasonable explanations given. The Arctic is actually a combination of different seas each with its own ocean current source. If one studies the different areas and the growth/melt of ice, you can gain quite a bit of understanding about how ice behaves up there. Go to http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/ , scroll down to the simple map, and click on the different colored areas surrounding the pole. You will see different graphs for ice melt and growth. Then study Arctic land temperatures at http://www.athropolis.com/map2.htm , understanding that these temperature recordings will likely include artifacts of the measuring device. You can then study jet stream and wind patterns at http://squall.sfsu.edu/crws/jetstream.html to gain an understanding of how wind can affect ice movement, melt, and growth. As soon as I can, I will get a web site to you of small ocean currents up there to add to your study. By combining these areas of information, you will see that the stall is not throughout the Arctic but in very limited areas and is reasonably explained.

Death Certificates don’t say “heat wave” or “cold snap” on them, so I assume the CDC has some way to seperate out body temp. related deaths during “non-extreme” ambient temp. from those during “extreme” ambient temps., giving an excess related to “extremes” – as reported in the Table’s figures?

I guess what bothers me is that thanks to the AGW fiasco I now know all too painfully that I have to worry about such details when I’m already paying for them to be taken care of by “government experts”. I don’t even worry as much about my car repairs being done correctly. My mechanics have more credibility than Gov’t scientists.

Well, good ole Montana is basking in zero to 20 below. I see the cardboard signs are gone from the interstate ramps, so it looks like the colder it gets the less people are ‘stranded’, ‘will work for food’ or ‘anything will help’. We need to get to -35 for 4 days so that we can kill off the bark beetle that is ravaging our forest (CO2 sinks) and then come up from there. I see New Orleans and Vegas got to shovel a couple inches of global warming.

“What’s going on with the Arctic ice graph??? Two dips??? What is happening??”

If you go to cryosphere today and have a look at a comparison between, say, December 10 and today, you can see pretty much what is happening. The areas of less consolidated ice, say ice at 60% or less concentration seem to have been pushed around by storms. While the amount of 80-100% concentration is still growing, it appears that storms have compacted a lot of the less consolidated ice between Greenland and Europe.

Also, most of the broad areas that freeze have already done so. So if, for example, Hudson’s Bay freezes up a few days early, you will see the anomaly go more positive but when you get to the day where it normally is frozen, that anomaly goes away.

If you do the default comparison with 1980, you will see that there is still plenty of “catching up” to do on the Atlantic side of the Arctic ocean.

You will notice that there is currently little ice below 80-100% concentration on the Atlantic side right now. That is probably more due to winds than temperature.

“I agree – warmer means good times, major cooling means bad times, end of civilizations and revolutions among other things and so forth – but – is inluenza the THE killer or is it “just a contributing factor”?”

A good point. Flu certainly can kill, even healthy adults, but seasonal flu predominantly sees off the very old and the very young so one could class that as ‘natural’. It can be the trigger for pneumonia, bronchitis, stroke, etc so the actual cause of death might not even be listed as influenza.

Ultimately we all die because our heart stops beating, but do we all die of heart attacks? Death is apportioned to one cause or another and influenza claims a big share.

Cold, flu. norovirus and many other nasties are all more prevalent in the winter. I’d rather have a warm one.

In 8th and 9th centaury AD during the North Europe’s unprecedented cooling, my ancestors spent nearly 100 years fighting local tribes on their way to warm Mediterranean. Subsequent medieval hot period (12th to 14th centaury AD) did not persuade them to go back.

If you know anything about history, the Medieval Warm Period was a prosperous, peaceful time when compared to the Little Ice Age. The Little Ice Age led to plagues, crop failures, massive starvation and many wars. It was a time of great social and political upheaval.

Most of the remaining arctic sea ice gain to be seen is in the Bering sea and the sea of Okhotsk. My suspicion is that the water in these seas hasn’t cooled yet to the level required to support sea ice, but based on the air temperatures in those areas I would expect it to start developing soon. Once ice formation starts to take off in the Bering sea and sea of Okhotsk, expect another rapid rise in sea ice extent…

If you know anything about history, the Medieval Warm Period was a prosperous, peaceful time when compared to the Little Ice Age. The Little Ice Age led to plagues, crop failures, massive starvation and many wars. It was a time of great social and political upheaval.

Going back a litle further you find the Dark Ages Cooling which had such wonderful events as the Goths, Alans, Alammani, Franks, Huns and other ‘Barbarian’ tribes being pushed out of the Black Sea region (due to collapsing agriculture brought on by cooling) and coming into the borders of The Roman Empire. Fast forward a little and the Western Empire has already collapsed, only to be partially reunited under Justinian in the mid-6th Century, only to be undone by the bubonic plague. Said pandemic may have wiped out as much as 50% of Europe’s population at that time (God knows how much of Africa and Asia’s population since there was still linkage from commerce).

Almost all mortality studies show that mortality rates are ‘displaced” during heat events, and are increased during cold events.

Simply put, this means that people that were going to die anyway, die a little quicker during heat events.

e.g. An area’s mortality rate for a given month is 100.

During the first 2 weeks, there is a heat event, and the mortality goes to 60 for the 2 weeks. For the remaining two weeks, the mortality is 40, giving an total of 100 for the period. Mortality increases during the heat event, then decreases after the event, giving roughly the same mortality rate for the period.

Conversely, in a cold event during the same month, the mortality goes to 60 for the two weeks of the event. For the remaining two weeks, the mortality remains at 60, giving a monthly rate of 120. Mortality rates in cold events increase during and after the event, effectively increasing the mortality rate for the entire period.

Note that some of the events below (in Israel and California) define a cold event as 10 deg C or less. I wish.

Also note that the NHS in the UK, puts the death toll from cold at 20,000, or more, a year. The BBC had one estimate of 35,000. PER YEAR

Kloner, R.A., Poole, W.K. and Perritt, R.L. 1999. When throughout the year is coronary death most likely to occur? A 12-year population-based analysis of more than 220,000 cases. Circulation 100: 1630-1634.

I am a skeptic.Global warming has become a new religion. – Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.

Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly.As a scientist I remain skeptical. – Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology and formerly of NASA who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called among the most preeminent scientists of the last 100 years.
Warming fears are the worst scientific scandal in the history. When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists. – UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.

The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesnt listen to others. It doesnt have open minds. I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists,- Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet.

The models and forecasts of the UN IPCC “are incorrect because they only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity. – Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don buy into anthropogenic global warming. – U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.

Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapour and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will. – Geoffrey G. Duffy a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, NZ.

For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?” – Geologist Dr. David Gee the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Gore prompted me to start delving into the science again and I quickly found myself solidly in the skeptic camp Climate models can at best be useful for explaining climate changes after the fact. – Meteorologist Hajo Smit of Holland, who reversed his belief in man-made warming to become a skeptic, is a former member of the Dutch UN IPCC committee.

Many [scientists] are now searching for a way to back out quietly (from promoting warming fears), without having their professional careers ruined. – Atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh.

Creating an ideology pegged to carbon dioxide is a dangerous nonsense The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control, a pretext for major businesses and political battle. It became an ideology, which is concerning.- Environmental Scientist Professor Delgado Domingos of Portugal, the founder of the Numerical Weather Forecast group, has more than 150 published articles.

CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or another. Every scientist knows this, but it doesn pay to say so Global warming, as a political vehicle, keeps Europeans in the driver seat and developing nations walking barefoot. – Dr. Takeda Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University in Japan.

The [global warming] scaremongering has its justification in the fact that it is something that generates funds. – Award-winning Paleontologist Dr. Eduardo Tonni, of the Committee for Scientific Research in Buenos Aires and head of the Paleontology Department at the University of La Plata.

More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims

POZNAN, Poland, December 18, 2008 – The UN global warming conference which concluded Friday in Poland faced a serious challenge from over 650 dissenting scientists from around the globe who criticized the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore. A newly updated U.S. Senate Minority Report was released last week featuring the dissenting voices of over 650 international scientists, many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN.

The report has added about 250 scientists (and growing) in 2008 to the over 400 scientists who spoke out in 2007. The over 650 dissenting scientists are more than 12 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers.

I think that most of us here understand that humanity prospers during warm climate episodes and suffers greatly during the cold episodes. I also think that most of us here would agree that when our planet warms, there isn’t a darn thing we can do about it (not that we would want to). But what if the opposite happens? Our planet has seen some cooling as of late. What if this were to continue and we plunged into another LIA, or worse yet, a full-blown IA similar to the Wisconsin glacial episode? Could we do anything to stave it off, or attenuate it?

Suppose we were to mine (with explosives) the methane clathrate deposits along the continental margins and release the methane to the atmosphere? Methane is supposed to be 25 times stronger (by weight) as a GHG than CO2. The half-life of methane in the atmosphere is only seven years, so it wouldn‘t stay there too long. The clathrate deposits are estimated to be around 1-5 quadrillion m^3 in size. Would it work? Or would it be offset by the reduced atmospheric humidity due to the cooling of the oceans? Maybe we could deal with a LIA, but a full-blown IA would be too much. Of course, in the beginning, we wouldn’t know which we were dealing with. Could any other idea work? I don’t know. Someone smarter than I am will have to weigh in on this. Of course the ethics of the situation are an entirely different matter. I am focusing on the science of the question.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t go anywhere near tin-foil. This is a serious question and I would like to know what others think. I’ve thought about this for some time and this seems to be an appropriate thread. Hands-down the last IA was the greatest climatic event to ever affect humans. Humans spread into Europe (and elsewhere) once before and prospered, only to be pushed out by advancing glacial conditions. Could we prevent that from happening again, or are we just at the mercy of our planet’s cold climate episodes? I think this is a much better question than this silly AGW nonsense.

Thanks for that crosspatch,, seems like a valid explanation.
Richard:
If they used October’s “record ice growth” data it would be shooting up. I reckon that they are using the data from August/September 2007! haha

If I have a choice between dying from the Heat or Cold, I would take Cold because once you get past the shivers, the Body goes into protection mode and all body heat is concentrated for the internal Organs. Your Mind transcends into sleep mode. Literally shutting down and you loose Consciousness, never to wake up! Not bad, I think!

One has to remember, a lot of the Deaths from cold are Senior Citizens that do not have good circulation. Hence they feel cold all the time. The cost of heat one’s Home is beyond what they cane afford, so they run electric heaters in specific areas to keep warm. If they loose power, they die! Another is Heart Attacks, people not use to shovelling snow. I think another one, one which you do not hear much about is People drinking alcohol. A drunk walking home, thinking he can make it but passes out in sub zero temps.. This is NOT good for He is already cold in the extremeties as soon as He walks outside. Alcohol induces a false feeling of warmth where circulation actually speeds up taking Heat away from the Skin; thus Hypothermia. Again, not a bad way to die because after the shivers, you don’t feel a thing!

IMHO, the root cause of our Ice Ages (including the rapidly approaching next glaciation) is the tectonic positioning of Antarctica over the South Pole. That continental land mass accumulates H20 in the form of ice and prevents moderating oceanic circulation from the Pole to the Equator.

So to mitigate the coming next glaciation, and to ensure the beneficial Warmth that we all know is Better, we should artificially induce polar-equatorial heat transfer by nuking Antarctic ice shelves and towing the ice to warmer climes.

This would alleviate the growing cold trend and give otherwise useless, blood-sucking bureaucrats something worthwhile to do. If Algore and his minions had gone off the deep end as Global Cooling Alarmists, then their raging authoritarianism might have been tolerable (to some slight degree). Especially if they concentrated their efforts in Antarctica and left the rest of the world alone.

~”We’re getting more snow and cold because of global warming. It makes all our extreme weather more extreme. … Las Vegas is having a blizard because of GW… And arctic summer ice is going away faster than we ever expected and the arctic will be ice free within 5 to 10 years if we don’t take action now to stop global warming. This (snow and cold in Las Vegas and Malibu) is what global warming looks like.”

“IMHO, the root cause of our Ice Ages (including the rapidly approaching next glaciation) is the tectonic positioning of Antarctica over the South Pole.”

The only problem with that is that we have only had ice at the North pole for about the last 2 million years or so. The current period of glaciations appear to have begun only 2 million years ago in the NH. Antarctica has been continuously iced over for about the past 12-14 million years.

One hypothesis is that it was the completion of the isthmus of Panama that caused a change in Atlantic ocean currents.

But in any case, if there were no land near the poles, there would probably be no ice near the poles either. If the Southern Ocean were completely open waters, water would cool, sink, and be replaced by warmer water. Any ice forming would be blown across the ocean. It is only the land mass that allows ice to accumulate. And if the Arctic ocean were not nearly completely bound by land, we would have the same situation there. The Arctic is extremely sensitive to sea level changes, too, because the Bering Strait is only 30-50 meters deep. A drop in sea level or a rise in sea floor due to Pacific plate subduction cuts off a source of circulation.

But still nobody has explained to my personal satisfaction how things manage to suddenly switch so rapidly, within only a decade or two, from glaciation to interglacial.

For example … when we are in a glaciation, salt water to the arctic from the Pacific is cut off. As sea levels drop, less of the ice floats on water and becomes anchored on land. Florida becomes enormous. The Gulf of Mexico shrinks and islands appear that would disrupt the Gulf Stream and the Caribbean Current. An absolutely huge land mass appears off the coast of Newfoundland (about as large as Newfoundland itself) , what we call the Grand Banks becomes a large, flat, and probably pretty swampy island (I would look there for oil). The US coastline extends all the way out to the Continental Shelf. Under these conditions, it should be very difficult to suddenly, within 10 to 50 years time, go from a North American continental climate with year round permafrost as far South as the Kansas/Nebraska state line to a temperate climate like we have today. Which is pretty much what happened. The change is very abrupt.

There is a piece of the puzzle that is missing that is not explained simply by orbital mechanics. Somehow the snowstorms are replaced by rainstorms melting huge quantities of ice. Vast inland lakes would appear because the crust would still be depressed and hadn’t had a chance to rebound yet and a lot of ice would be melting quite suddenly.

Europe would see permafrost as far South as the Mediterranean coast of Spain, across Greece and Albania, the entire country we know as Russia would be unfit for farming and tundra would extend to Turkey and the former Soviet Asian republics. Basically look at a globe and follow the 40th parallel around the world to see the permafrost line at greatest advance during the last glaciation. And it reached that greatest advance JUST before things very suddenly switched the other direction.

When this happens again. When we go into another 100,000 years of glaciation, our world as we know it is going to turn absolutely upside down as far as political and social fallout. And it *will* happen again and considering the length of this interglacial already, it is probably going to happen quite soon in geological time (in the next 10 to 20 centuries).

Bjorn Lomberg deals with the heat/cold mortality issue very well in his most recent book “Cool It.” I’ll take his cool rationality over the hot headed extremists like Hansen, Gore, the IPCC, CNN and now Reuters.

Ron de Haan (02:37:28) :
Our modern society is extremely vulnerable for extreme winter conditions.
And if the world should experience a new Maunder Minimum event without preparation, the major problem will be how to maintain our food supplies.

On “Fast Money” (a CNBC trader show) Mr. Gartman (the commodities specialist guest) pointed out that the extreme cold in the middle of the country without an existing snow cover over the ground indicated a probable lower yield this year. While he wasn’t ready to put a trade on yet, he indicated that this was the best choice in the present sea of falling commodities.

Now multiply that by: Canada, Australia, Ukraine, Argentina, …

FWIW, the ‘grain fund’ JJG looks like near a bottom but not yet confirmed (by crossing over 50 day moving average and moving average slope changing to positive). “COW” the livestock fund is dropping and “MOO” the ag inputs (fertilizers et.al.) has crossed the m.a. and is started up. (Yes, those are real tickers… traders have humor too ;-)

I take this as saying that the start of the food chain (literally) has started up, the grain is still in the ground so can not be predicted yet, and the cattle are still being sold off to raise cash as much as possible in the present “no financing available” market.

What to do? Get a hot cocoa and enjoy Christmas! It’s gonna be a white one! (Cocoa is NIB, rising fast, and coffee is JO, bottoming, … Cup of JO might be cheaper ;-)

Its interesting to see that the total death rate for the US of 2 million is equal to the total yearly deaths from malaria of about two million.

The most cost effective way to prevent malaria is with a $15 mosquito net per family, good for a couple of years. How many deaths could have been prevented if the 40 billion wasted on AGW had been spent on mosquito nets!

IMHO, the root cause of our Ice Ages (including the rapidly approaching next glaciation) is the tectonic positioning of Antarctica over the South Pole. That continental land mass accumulates H20 in the form of ice and prevents moderating oceanic circulation from the Pole to the Equator.

I also used to think this. Turns out open water at the poles causes the Earth to lose heat quicker than ice stored up on land at the poles. For instance, the “Frozen Earth” ice age happened when the poles were both ocean. Our current ice age is perhaps caused by the uplift of the Himalayas, which give the Earth a lot of low latitude ice. Polar ice reflects very little sunlight. Equatorial ice reflects a lot. Earth has been steadily cooling since India rammed into Asia.

The glacial advances and retreats during our current ice age correlate with the changes in geometry of Earth’s orbit and spin. See MacDougall, “Frozen Earth”, a history of ice ages from the perspective of geologists. The big question for (distant?) future generations is: Will the Earth continue to gradually cool until the oceans freeze again?

“12.8.1…. However, it must be said that potential gains [benefits of Global Warming] have not been well documented, in part because of lack of stakeholder concern in such cases and consequent lack of special funding.”
Good catch J. Peden (07:37:23) :

“Turns out open water at the poles causes the Earth to lose heat quicker than ice stored up on land at the poles.”

That would be true. The overall ocean itself would become a more efficient heat engine transferring heat from equator to pole where it would be radiated and the cold water returned at depth. But I think evaporation plays a larger role in heat exchange than radiation does.

For example, how much does an ocean’s temperature vary between say 6pm and 6am? Not much. But if you increase the wind by a couple of miles per hour, you can cool the surface instantly.

What I would expect to find at the South Pole if Antarctica wasn’t there would be relatively warm water creating huge banks of fog and cloud which would tend to insulate the surface from efficient radiation. The water would likely appear to be “steaming”. I would expect to find a very thick cloud deck over that relatively warm water.

I am skeptical of what the IPCC 4th Assessment et al state – that CO2 is the main driver of AGW. My issue is the thought that many scientists are looking for a way out of supporting this “theory,” while maintaining their funding streams. Couple with the link up above that showed another CNN weather guesser stating that Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” over stepped it’s bounds by stating that Katrina was strengthened by AGW – and then recanted the following day.

One word – cowards. In the moral, ethical and principle sense – all cowards. That is something to remember as their house of cards collapses. There is strength in truth, numbers as well. The longer they stay on board this ludicrous hypothesis, the more damage they inflict not just on themselves, but on science in general.

This politicization of science is a deal with the devil – and there will be hell to pay the longer that this tragic and foolish charade is played.

What I would expect to find at the South Pole if Antarctica wasn’t there would be relatively warm water creating huge banks of fog and cloud which would tend to insulate the surface from efficient radiation. The water would likely appear to be “steaming”. I would expect to find a very thick cloud deck over that relatively warm water.

If the envirocrits have their way and electricity becomes a luxury for people without trust funds, lots of people will die facing heat waves without air conditioning. The death toll in France a few years was so high because air conditioning was not available to many old people there.

Of course you have peer-reviewed research to support this. Reference please.

Coastal areas near San Francisco have a nice ring of snow sticking on the hills around them. Looks like about 2000 ft to me. A very early yard duty teacher thought she saw scattered small light flakes melting on contact with the ground a couple of days ago. We’re at about 80 feet elevation…

One more like this and we’re gonna have a white Christmas on the beaches of California…

Joseph, I think it would be a lot easier and more controllable to look at dusting glaciers with soot or putting super light weight mirrors in space rather than trying to do explosive mining of the ocean floor for a flammable gas…

But in the end we are really too small to have much impact on the weather, we are just along for the ride. Maybe we could mitigate a bit, but stop it?…

Mike D. (13:39:16) :
IMHO, the root cause of our Ice Ages (including the rapidly approaching next glaciation) is the tectonic positioning of Antarctica over the South Pole.

I was trying to avoid the ‘stopping an Ice Age’ thread, but since it seems to have caught on…

I don’t remember who it was, but a geologist has stated that the ice ages came when N and S America joined shutting down the current between them. He further stated that ice ages could be prevented by digging the Panama Canal a log deeper and wider… Don’t know how Panama would feel about nuclear dredging…

(If you really care enough to want a citation and details, enjoy your Google time, I have dinner to make…)

crosspatch (14:33:48) :
There is a piece of the puzzle that is missing that is not explained simply by orbital mechanics.

Don’t know if it’s right or not, but the most interesting explanation I’ve heard is that the water level in the oceans drop to the destabilization pressure of the methane clathrates. This gives a huge, very sharp, methane pulse that starts warming. As the ice retreats, all the old plant stuff trapped under the glaciers from eons past is exposed and rots adding more methane. Repeat until warm when plants grow and sequester CO2 and redeposit in the ocean and get trapped under the (newly) advancing ice.

Mongo (15:41:35) :
I am skeptical of what the IPCC 4th Assessment et al state – that CO2 is the main driver of AGW.

I think that the A is the key here. By definition it excludes natural warming pressures. Of all the things we do, CO2 is probably the largest, but still completely irrelevant to the Natural warming NGW… now colding NGC…

Tropospheric ozone can act both as a direct greenhouse gas […] As a direct greenhouse gas, it is thought to have caused around one third of all the direct greenhouse gas induced warming seen since the industrial revolution.
[…].
The largest net source of tropospheric ozone is influx from the stratosphere.

Shows ozone is about -10% to -30% deviation in the north pole and up to (down to?) -40% deviation in the south pole on 2008/12/13.

Given that O3 is a GHG and a significant % of GHGs … maybe the GHG folks are somewhat right. GHGs do matter, just not the way they think. The sun goes quiet, O3 plummets, the poles get really really cold and the rest of the planet starts to cool off fast?

Just call it the Smith Solar O3 Pump Theory if anything ever comes of it ;-)

Well, maybe what I would expect to find at the pole without Antarctica there in winter would be something like the polar region of Saturn. There would likely be a season-long hurricane. All that rising air being warmed by the ocean would probably result in a storm that the circumpolar jet would keep stationary until it breaks down in spring. There might even be a polar ocean vortex, too, where sinking water would create a situation not unlike pulling the bathtub drain. You would have an atmospheric convection system that would be persistent for several months coupled with an ocean vortex that would suck cooling surface water to the bottom where it would spread out and return to the equator. Provided there was no major continental land mass South of the Antarctic Circle.

Science Daily reported that cosmic rays do not explain Global Warming, the ice is melting faster than models predicted and so on. Sounds like the world is coming to an end, but not! Places like Vegas and New Orleans haven’t see much snow got dumped on. I guess it was the first time in 30 years the Vegas strip got 3.6 inches of snow. Last year was one of the snowiest winters in my area.

Not only that, but cold. This month the average temp is down like around 9 degrees in my area and we just blasted with a major snow storm. More snow expected Saturday night, and another major snowstorm looming for next week. So much for global warming this year, huh… It like the late 1970s all over again!

Even if we went through 5 straight years of cooling, we would still get reports on how much the earth is warming…lol

Old Coach, it is my (admittedly weak) understanding that the Permian Ice Age occurred when the super-continent Pangea drifted over the South Pole.

E.M., it is my (admittedly weak) understanding that the planet had been cooling fairly steadily since the Eocene of 50 mya. The Late Rupelian event (30.5 mya) probably coincided with beginning of full continental glaciation on Antarctica. There was a slight warming trend in the mid-Miocene, from 17.5 to 15 mya, possibly due to flood basalt eruptions. Antarctica was at one time connected to Africa and South America. The final detachment from the latter occurred about 5 mya?, setting up the circumpolar current. That tipped the system into full-on ice ages beginning roughly 2 mya, although the Panamanian closure was probably a driver too.

crosspatch, you bring up a key point. The Milankovich solar irradiation nadir was ~60 kya, but the Wisconsin glaciation did not break up until ~5,000 years before the Milankovich optimum. That plus the rapidity of the changes imply some sort of threshold, positive feedback warming effect was reached, or conversely, that the positive cooling feedback of the glaciation was suddenly interrupted. Destabilization of methane clathrates is an interesting theory. Is there any evidence? Pluvial rains on a previously dessicated ice sheet is also an interesting theory. What drove that? Is there evidence?

IMHO, the glaciation/interglacial harmonics are THE climate change question. Global warming after 9,000 years of neo-glaciation is only marginally interesting, especially considering that it is ephemeral at best. If we could disrupt the inexorable neo-glaciation with cow farts, SUV’s, etc. then great. But will all that really work? We absolutely need better understanding of our 100,000 climate cycle if we are to stave off the 20th repetition of Snowball Planet.

Cold is finally starting to settle in here around 55 degrees North Latitude in Canada. I continue to be puzzled by the slowdown in the Arctic ice formation. I am thinking that another possibility for the slowdown in ice formation is that the cold that initially formed the early ice is cooling the water faster, which is causing the cold water to sink at faster rates. This sinking cold water is forcing warmer water to flow Northward from Equatorial regions at faster rates. If this is the mechanism that is bringing warmer water Northward, then we should see cooler than usual anomalies growing in the oceans near the Equator. If true, the equatorial regions should continue cooling at a faster rate. Land temperatures in the North located away from water seem to be getting very cold while Europe is now getting warmed by the water, and Alaska seems to be getting warmer on the Pacific side. Is there any data available on ocean current speeds recorded at weekly time intervals?

I just finished organizing my UAH data spreadsheets. All the data is on sheet one, and each column of data is graphed on a succeeding sheet of its own. At the top of each graph sheet I have graphs that are linked to the month of my choosing for the region, the ocean, and land. At the bottom I just finished adding graphs that display the entire time period from 12/1978 to the present for the region, the oceans, and land. It is very interesting to observe the ocean and land graphs at the same time for the 30 year period of data, and then comparing the tropics to mid latitudes and to the polar regions. It was worth the effort to construct these graphs.

The sun certainly does appear to be the main driver for the Earth’s climate, with water extremely important. I don’t think CO2 plays any significant role in determining Earth’s climate, and hardly worth talking about. If CO2 were 3000 parts per million in the atmosphere, I still doubt it would be an important climate forcing agent.

“Pluvial rains on a previously dessicated ice sheet is also an interesting theory. What drove that? Is there evidence?”

The evidence is that the ice is gone. Had it kept snowing, it would still be there. At some point the precipitation changed to rain instead of snow. That would have melted the previous winter’s snow. The water would have ponded between the ice and the terminal moraines and as the crust was depressed by the weight, huge lakes would have existed. In fact, lakes Superior, Michigan and Huron were all one lake until only about 2000 years or so ago as post-glacial rebound continues there and land rose up to separate the lakes.

When a combination of rising water and crustal rebound brought the water levels up to a point where they breached any barrier to an outlet, we would have seen major flooding … as was also seen out West when Lake Bonneville overflowed to the North. Once it started raining on those glaciers in summer, it would have been all over.

And maybe that is all the trigger than is needed. Maybe a long term change in weather pattern that brings cold, snowy winters with cool dry summers is all that is needed. If you get boatloads of snow in winter and no precipitation in the summer, the snow might last longer. But still the missing piece is how it can go so cold so fast. Now I do realize the the cooling seems to be more gradual than the warming,

Drop sea levels 100 meters and see how many Greek islands become connected. And such building of lakes and eventual breaching of containment features makes it little wonder that there are stories passed through the ages such as Atlantis and the Great Flood. Such stories were not limited to just people of that region, either:

A Hopi myth describes Atlantis as a land in which great cities were created and crafts flourished, but when the people became corrupt and warlike, a great flood destroyed their world.

We have had writing for what, 5000 years or so? Imagine sea levels 100 meters lower than today for 100,000 years. Imagine the coastal settlement that would have taken place. Now imagine “Meltwater Pulse 1A” that happened about 14,000 years ago. In the space of only 500 years or so, sea levels rose some 25 meters. So in 500 years the sea level came up about 25% of what had taken 100,000 years to go out. 25 meters of sea level rise is a lot particularly where most of the coast is on continental shelf that is fairly flat. Entire tribal areas could have been inundated in a single generation. Tribes could have been pushed inland into the territory of other tribes. So imagine where sea level was in 1500 and imagine it being 25 meters higher now. London would be another “Atlantis” legend and would now stand miles offshore.

And that wasn’t the end of it either. The water kept rising though that period was the fastest rise. Between 7500 and 8000 years ago there was another rise of about 13 meters. In the last 100 years it has risen less than a foot.

It *had* to be raining on that ice. Because if it had kept snowing, it would still be there.

radun (11:43:13) :
“…
For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?” – Geologist Dr. David Gee the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.
…”

My rough guess … when the glaciers are marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, maybe the AGW crowd, the IPCC, and their slavish pols will scratch their heads and wonder where they went wrong.

Yes, and they are exposing 5000 year old wood in the process. Meaning that 5000 years ago, the area that is now glacier was forest. And other glaciers are exposing other artifacts as they recede such as leather clothing, arrows, even ancient Roman coins.

And I sincerely doubt the rate is “accelerating”. Also the study only goes to 2007. 2007 would be when I would expect to see the glacial retreat start to reverse. My guess is that 2008 would have shown a stop in this “retreat” and 2009 will show (as Alaska and Scandinavia have shown in 2008) a glacial advance.

Subfossil remains of wood and peat from six Swiss glaciers found in proglacial fluvial sediments indicate that glaciers were smaller than the 1985 reference level and climatic conditions allowed vegetation growth in now glaciated basins. An extended data set of Swiss glacier recessions consisting of 143 radiocarbon dates is presented to improve the chronology of glacier fluctuations. A comparison with other archives and dated glacier advances suggests 12 major recession periods occurring at 9850- 9600, 9300-8650, 8550-8050, 7700-7550, 7450-6550, 6150-5950, 5700-5500, 5200-4400, 4300-3400, 2800-2700, 2150-1850, 1400-1200 cal. yr BP. It is proposed that major glacier fluctuations occurred on a multicentennial scale with a changing pattern during the course of the Holocene. After the Younger Dryas, glaciers receded to a smaller extent and prolonged recessions occurred repeatedly, culminating around 7 cal. kyr BP. After a transition around 6 cal. kyr BP weak fluctuations around the present level dominated. After 3.6 cal. kyr BP less frequent recessions interrupted the trend to advanced glaciers peaking with the prominent ‘Little Ice Age’. This trend is in line with a continuous decrease of summer insolation during the Holocene.

In other words, we have cycles of advance and recession of the glaciers but overall it is getting colder.

When this happens again. When we go into another 100,000 years of glaciation, our world as we know it is going to turn absolutely upside down as far as political and social fallout. And it *will* happen again and considering the length of this interglacial already, it is probably going to happen quite soon in geological time (in the next 10 to 20 centuries).

I think we can control it, and not with greenhouse gases.
I vote for light weight mirrors in space to increase insolation. Thick aluminum foil should do it.

“Yes, and they are exposing 5000 year old wood in the process. Meaning that 5000 years ago, the area that is now glacier was forest. And other glaciers are exposing other artifacts as they recede such as leather clothing, arrows, even ancient Roman coins.”

When was the great flood supposed to take place? See, maybe it was Noah who simply dumped the junk there? ;)

Or maybe God just put them there to test our faith and/or our reasoning skills… ;D

As I understand it from Geologists we’re not likely (real likely as opposed to an IPCC one) to undergo an ice age for another 50-100,000 yrs. But it is a very interesting area of research which should be undertaken & planned for, should man still be here? We know, or at least some scientists know that as a race we will one day have to leave little old earth behind if we’re to survive, will it be then? I don’t know.

I agree with Brooklyn Red Leg :-) that the IPCC’s next meeting should be held in Ojmjakon, Russia if it’s that cold, limit the aircon & heating system or let it go faulty right in the middle of tense negotiations, might just concentrate the minds of those experts a little bit! Just why do they hold them at the perfect time of year in those exotic locations?

Penultimately, I would concur with Number Watch, Humanity is a minor infestation of a minor planet orbiting a minor star in a minor galaxy!

Finally, may I wish everyone a very Happy & Peaceful Christmas & New Year, & may your God go with you.

““Yes, and they are exposing 5000 year old wood in the process. Meaning that 5000 years ago, the area that is now glacier was forest. And other glaciers are exposing other artifacts as they recede such as leather clothing, arrows, even ancient Roman coins.”

When was the great flood supposed to take place? See, maybe it was Noah who simply dumped the junk there? ;)

Or maybe God just put them there to test our faith and/or our reasoning skills… ;D”

Depending on which young earth Biblical timescale one wishes to use the Flood could have been almost 6000 years ago, which would place 5000 year old Alp artifacts well within the correct age range.

If the envirocrits have their way and electricity becomes a luxury for people without trust funds, lots of people will die facing heat waves without air conditioning. The death toll in France a few years was so high because air conditioning was not available to many old people there.

Of course you have peer-reviewed research to support this. Reference please.

Took all of ONE search in Google to find out about the deaths – guess you couldn’t be bothered to look for yourself, Mr. Jones?

Scientists at INSERM, the National Institute of Health and Medical Research, deduced the toll by determining that France had experienced 14,802 more deaths than expected for the month of August.

The toll exceeds the prior government count of 11,435, a figure that was based only on deaths in the first two weeks of the month.

The new estimate includes deaths from the second half of August, after the record-breaking temperatures of the first half of the month had abated.

The bulk of the victims — many of them elderly — died during the height of the heat wave, which brought suffocating temperatures of up to 104 degrees in a country where air conditioning is rare. Others apparently were greatly weakened during the peak temperatures but did not die until days later.

Of course, it’s an adaptive process – if the cimate does swing massively to colder or warmer temps, the architectural styles will change. And the above was a freak heat wave in 2003. Now they’re getting blizzards.

“Ross (21:04:50) :
My rough guess … when the glaciers are marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, maybe the AGW crowd, the IPCC, and their slavish pols will scratch their heads and wonder where they went wrong.

Doug in Mankato, MN (07:10:22) :
One source of data I have not heard anyone talking about on this site or anyplace else I can find is the ocean data from the ARGO project, the worldwide array of robot floats that was completed about a year or so ago. This is a project with international support and I would think by now some of this data would be starting to tell us something about ocean temperature trends, currents and salinity. The home site is The site and the system itself is not meant to do analysis of the data collected, but rather to provide an international data base for anyone it who does. It was originally initiated to study global warming. Could it be that the lack of media coverage is due to the fact that it hasn’t shown any GW so far? Would be interested to know if any of the readers of this site have seen any referances to ARGO data.”

In response to the topic “Today in Climate History – Dec 12th, 1938 -getting warmer” I asked(above) if anyone had seen any results or references to the ARGO project data. Since then I have found two references:

The first is a paper published in June which discussed the cooling biases in some of the ARGO floats and also the warming biases in the pre-ARGO technology for measuring ocean temperatures. The second is a blog entry from someone on the ARGO team referencing a more recent article in Nature in August of this year by a team that apparently analyzed both pre-ARGO and ARGO data. I can’t access the Nature article, but the conclusions of both articles seem to be that prior to the ARGO network coming on line four years ago the oceans were gradually heating and since then the ARGO data seems to show NO overall change in temperature. From the first article it appears that most of the ARGO data is systematically correctable. Those same authors admit that the pre-ARGO technology was not really designed for climate analysis and that those data have problems. Both sets of authors, of course, insist that the case for warming oceans is “compelling” and that the current stable state(which, by the way is the only state for which we have good data) is just a phase in a constantly trend upward.

Again, I would like to know if anyone has seen other articles on ocean temperature, currents, etc. which reference the ARGO system. As a layman with a science background(retired electrical engineer) it would seem to me that the oceans, because of their enormous mass in comparison to anything else on the surface of the planet, would also have an enormous effect on the global climate compared to anything else.

Yes, and they are exposing 5000 year old wood in the process. Meaning that 5000 years ago, the area that is now glacier was forest. And other glaciers are exposing other artifacts as they recede such as leather clothing, arrows, even ancient Roman coins.

Wally (06:24:32) :
Depending on which young earth Biblical timescale one wishes to use the Flood could have been almost 6000 years ago, which would place 5000 year old Alp artifacts well within the correct age range.

Don’t know if it fits any Biblical time scales or not, but…

There is also the issue of the Clovis people. The most interesting explanation so far was that a meteor or asteroid bit hit the ice cover of N. America and a) Killed off most Clovis people. b) Killed of most megafauna. c) Left no crater since it hit ice and released the melt water lakes which d) lead to the Younger Dryas cooling. About 12k yrs ago which would still allow for persistent flood myths world wide to be (barely) preserved.

The bottom line on this, IMHO, is that we are flyspecks on the earth and the forces that drive climate are so huge we have not a chance of controlling them. Could we stop a nice big space rock tomorrow? Stop the orbital eccentricity changes? Change the Earth’s precession? Influence the polar wobble? Stop the sun from taking a nap after an overactive workout? Maybe even just stop the PDO?

There have been many ‘ice-epochs’ during which there are ice-ages. These, per the graph part way down the page, correspond with the time just after the solar system transits a spiral arm of the galaxy. We have just (in galactic time!) finished such a transit and ought to be leaving the subsequent ice-epoch. This would imply that each ice age ought to be less severe than the preceding ‘for a while’.

If that means were all done with ice ages or that we’re in for a slightly less catastrophic disaster I’ll leave for others to decide…

There is also a wonderful little book, that I can’t find on my self right now… I think the title was “The Ice Ages”. I’ll try to get a full citation later. It is mostly a history of the discovery of the ice ages, but along the way explains the how. A great read.

Memo to self: Two coffees before posting in morning (improves proof reading, spelling & typing) and glasses on before looking at bookshelf…

E.M.Smith (08:51:02) :
There is also a wonderful little book, that I can’t find on my self right now…

Got it. “Ice Age, the Theory That Came in From the Cold” by John & Mary Gribbin. Published by Barnes & Nobel, Inc. by arrangement with Penguin Books Ltd. ISBN 0-7607-3406-2 The book is about 100 pages and an easy read. It mostly explores the people and process of the discovery of the ice ages. Along the way you get to understand how they happen, and how folks made the discovery of their existence and worked to an understanding of them. The history of folks doing things like calculating by hand orbital changes while in prison… lets just say you get a new respect for science…

Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery by Imbrie, John and Katherine Palmer Imbrie. 1986. Harvard University Press.

One of the founders of modern paleooceanography, John Imbrie is (2004) the Henry L. Doherty Professor of Oceanography Emeritus at Brown. In addition to more than 60 articles in scientific journals dealing with the Earth’s past climate, Imbrie has published four books, including Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery, which he wrote with his daughter Katherine, and which won the 1976 Phi Beta Kappa prize.

Dr. Imbrie was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1978, and in 1981 was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship. He is a fellow of the Geological Society of America, the American Philosophical Society, the American Meteorological Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition to the Vetlesen Prize, Imbrie was honored with the American Geophysical Union’s Maurice Ewing Medal in 1986, the Lyell Medal for Geology of the Geological Society of London in 1991, the Vega Medal of the Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography in 1999, and the Milankovic Medal in 2003.

John Imbrie was a member of the team that vindicated the work of Milutin Milankovic by demonstrating that changes in the geometry of the Earth-Sun system did indeed pace the glacial cycles of the Pleistocene.

One could take the same optimistic view (necessity is the mother of invention) to the challenge posed by global warming.

I’m afraid that, being an engineer, I don’t share your optimism that technology will magically produce the goods that the politicians decree.
Most of the major technological advancements have already taken place – especially in the fields of agriculture and energy efficiency. Most technological advances still to be made in these areas will be small, incremental improvements.
As far as energy generation goes, the next major advancement will be the development of commercially viable nuclear fusion – and this may still be several decades away.
In the meantime, there will be a lot of hardship as energy costs increase by huge amounts, while politicians continue to throw huge sums of money away on non-starters such as wind power.